Page - 576 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc-nd License. ©  dirk jacob jansen, ���9  |  doi:�0.��63/9789004359499_0�4 Chapter �� The Musaeum: Its Contents 12.1 Introduction When Strada in 1568 thanked Duke Guglielmo of Mantua for the benefice conferred on his elder son Paolo, he offered the use of his house to the Duke, providing a brief description of its contents and adding that ‘most of these things have been seen by all those gentlemen of the court of Your Excellency that have been here [in Vienna]’.1 This confirms the accessibility of Strada’s Musaeum and the representative function it fulfilled. To have any idea of the impact the Musaeum had on such visitors, it is useful to provide a quick sketch of its contents. A sketch, an impression: not a reconstruction. There are a number of sourc- es which give a very elementary impression of what Strada’s studiolo may have looked like, and there are some other sources which give slightly more con- crete information on which specific objects, or type of objects, passed through his hands. Some of these—in particular the large-scale acquisitions of antique sculpture for the Duke of Bavaria in 1566–1569—were certainly not intended for Strada’s own collection, and they did never even come to Vienna. In most cases the information is too scanty to identify objects mentioned with any cer- tainty, or to determine what their destination was. We just do not know wheth- er Strada bought them on behalf of the Emperor, whether he bought them on commission from other patrons, whether he bought them on speculation— that is as a true art-dealer, hoping to sell them to the visitors of his house or dispose of them advantageously in some other way—or whether he bought them after all just for his own collection. For this reason, except for Strada’s acquisitions for the Duke of Bavaria, in the following no distinction will be made between the objects that may have belonged to Strada’s private collection, and those that he bought or commis- sioned for a patron or intended as stock-in-trade. After all, in each of these cases the presence of these objects, their availability in Vienna, could influence those who—in the case of antiquities and works of art—saw and admired them, and those who—in the case of the manuscripts, the printed books and the graphic documentation—consulted or even studied them. The works of art incited the patron’s appetite for these or similar works; they modified the taste 1 Doc. 1568-12-28, quoted more fully below.